Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

February 20, 1970

The Screen: 'Au Hasard, Balthazar':Bresson Feature Opens at the New Yorker

By ROGER GREENSPUN

Published: February 20, 1970

ROBERT BRESSON'S "Au Hasard, Balthazar" first played in New York at the 1966 Film Festival, at which time it received mostly unfavorable notices. That it is having a theatrical opening now results largely from the perseverance of Cinema Ventures' Tom Russell and the New Yorker Theater's Dan Talbot—who has done so much for movies in this city that he probably deserves a review of his own.

Actually, Bresson, despite a general critical indifference and commercial failure that puts him in the company of the very greatest filmmakers (Carl Dreyer, for example) has never lacked for serious admirers. And the exceptional popularity of the recently completed Bresson retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art suggests that a much larger audience may be ready for him now than had ever heard of him only a few years ago.

Along with the early "Les Dimes du Bois de Boulogne" (1944), "Au Hasard, Balthazar" (the title translates literally as "Balthazar at Random") is my favorite among Bresson's nine features. It is at once his most complex and most accessible movie, which should not seem so strange in light of the kinds of films he makes.

His profoundly and unsentimentally religious vision and the severity and self-abnegation of his method set up certain expectations for any Bresson movie in relation to which "Au Hasard, Balthazar" looks like a sudden and gratifying relaxation in style. In fact, it is less austere (though possibly even more severe), than other Bresson films, and the multiplicity of things and themes (and things as theme), together with Bresson's most appealing hero, works for an unusual degree of audience empathy.

That hero, Balthazar, is a donkey who, after a happy early life with Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), daughter of a scientific farmer, is sold into harsh toil and exploitation at the hands of a series of masters. Meanwhile, Marie's family suffers through her father's proud stubbornness, and she herself into humiliating liaison with Gérard, leader of the genuinely vicious local young hoods. Periodically Marie and Balthazar are reunited, but at each reunion Gérard reappears (in a sense, Balthazar prepares for Gérard) to take the girl and to torture the donkey.

By the time he has finished, Gérard—whose evil is never explained but who adequately answers one set of his community's needs, just as Balthazar answers another set of needs—has stripped Marie naked and abandoned her in an empty house, and he has loaded the donkey with contraband silks, gold, and perfume, which he means to smuggle across the border. The ensuing death of Balthazar, less a surprise than a summation, is in its pathos and depth of association the most richly evocative sequence in all of Bresson and surely one of the most affecting passages in the history of film.

Where "Au Hasard, Balthazar" differs from Bresson's other films is in the degree to which it accepts and sustains a multiplicity of actions, objects, even, in an almost traditional sense, "character." Not that Bresson has lowered his vision (the film's range of associations in symbol and dogma should occupy any amateur of Christian theology for some time) but that he has expanded it to include a superbly precise and compassionate awareness of the physical universe.

In this film we are given not only the movements of souls and bodies, but also the knowledge of hands and hearts and of the ground we walk on.

"Au Hasard, Balthazar" proceeds by contraries—beginning with the sound track, which opens with a Schubert piano sonata rudely interrupted by a donkey's braying that lead to insights traditionally understandable only in terms of paradox. This is neither an easy film, nor, in the show biz sense, an entertaining one. It makes large demands upon its audience, and in return confers exceptional rewards. It is playing at the New Yorker Theater, and among recent openings it is the only absolutely essential moviegoing in New York.